East Asia contribute 15% pollutant to US

This is a report from NASA; good job for scientists, bad news for us. Hongbin Yu, researcher at Goddard Space Flight Center said that the amount of pollution from East Asia to North America is equivalent to about 15 percent of local emissions of the USA and Canada. Yu and Co’s used data from 2002 to 2005 to get this result.

Picture of MODIS courtesy of NASA

But how come? What makes Yu and his team could know whether such pollutant comes from East Asia and not from other region? The answer is MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer). It’s an instrument on NASA’s Terra Satellite which has an ability to distinguish industrial pollution and smoke from dust. Anyway, US pollution doesn’t come from Asia only. It’s also mostly come from Europe and vice versa (since US contributes a large number of pollution to others regions too).

However, the most important one from this report is that the pollution transport is a global problem, not merely because one or two regions.

Source: Daily Tech via NASA